Power supplies for providing DC power to large electronic installations such as mainframe computers conventionally consist of a number of individual power converters that are stacked one above the other on separate chassis in racks that may be enclosed in equipment cabinets. It is desirable for these racks to contain AC power lines and data and DC buses to which a converter or other electrical equipment may be connected merely by pushing its chassis into the rack. Because the converters used in a given installation would normally have the same shape and size horizontally but could be of varying heights, it is necessary for a bus system built into the rack to allow a converter to be plugged into it at substantially any vertical level. Prior art power system equipment bays have required that the location of each piece of plug-in equipment be predefined usually at the time of initial configuration of the system. Each piece of equipment must also be interconnected and traditionally this is done with a "power shelf" for the converter equipment, in which each power shelf supports three or four converters and a series of cables are used to interconnect multiple power shelves to a common distribution panel. Individual equipment not supported by power shelves must be interconnected using discrete cable assemblies.
Because of space and cost considerations, it is desirable to integrate the data bus with the DC bus, yet assure a reliable contact between the converter and the buses while preventing any possibility of short-circuiting the electronic circuitry during insertion or removal of an individual converter. A combined DC/data bus structure fulfilling these requirements is described in copending application Ser. No. 09/585,657 filed Jun. 1, 2000 and entitled Combined DC/Data Bus For Power Converter Racks. The connector that enables the power converter chassis to be plugged into this bus structure merely by pushing it into operating position in the rack is, however, not described and claimed in detail in the above-identified application.